Volume 2 - Intermission 106.1 - Breach
| CITIZEN! DO YOU KNOW WHO DECIDES YOUR ENEMY'S NEXT MOVE? IT IS NOBODY. AND EVERYBODY. FACTS: In the Stellar Republic, every citizen receives exactly one vote for their elections. The scientist who spent forty years mastering Void-theory? One vote. The man who believes the Void is a hoax, merely invented to raise taxes? Also one vote. The strategist who could save ten thousand lives with a single doctrine reform? One vote. The loudest fool on their hab-block, who has never once read past a headline’s outrageously designed title? One vote. The very same weight across all. They call this freedom, citizen. We call it what it is: Governance by the average. MERIT MEANS NOTHING THERE In the UHF, your worth is measured by what you do. Your service. Your unique skills. Your contribution to humanity's survival as a whole. The capable rise, and the wise lead—because that is the most logical choice, for when survival is on the very brink; when the Galactic War knocks at our door. In the Stellar Republic, ideas do not ever become reality by being right—ideas become reality by being easy to sell. Their doctrine is not what is best—it is what can be explained to the most people in the fewest words before they stop listening. Ask yourself this, citizen: Would you board a ship whose overarching course was set by the very janitors scrubbing the decks, the haulers bringing in cargo, or the shell-shocked Soldier on their fifth rotation, none of whom have ever stepped foot on a bridge? Their Soldiers do. Every day. "INDIVIDUALS" WHO AREN'T The Republic preaches the sanctity of the individual—one person, one voice, one vote. Yet their own technologies let every Soldier become more than one person. Duplicates. Copies. Echoes of a self, marching in ranks. One person. Many bodies. One vote? When a single Freak can be a crowd, citizen, what exactly is their "individual" worth? They undermined their founding ideal the very moment it becomes convenient—and yet they call us the ones with perverse principles. WHY WE WIN Their finest commanders cannot reform a single doctrine without selling it first to the bottom half of their electorate. Propaganda thrives in that soil. Lies outrun truth in every election. Their brightest minds spend their genius not on making the best decisions for winning the war, but on marketing them to the dumbest people of their Faction. This is not a weakness we created, citizen. It is a weakness they chose. For centuries, it has kept them exactly where they belong: Beneath us. REMEMBER THIS Could you imagine it, citizen? A world where the most credulous soul you have ever met—the one who believes every lie sight-unseen—holds precisely as much power over your future as the most gifted person alive? Possibly even more, for their friends are likely just as gullible and they hold great sway over them as a result? You do not have to imagine it. For that reality has a flag. It has a fleet. And it is pointed at your home to make you just like them. To take your hard-earned merit and throw it into the darkest Void. To make your individuality nothing but a shackle around your ankles. Merit guides us. The average governs them. THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE THAT WINS THIS WAR. [Excerpt From “Bulletin Series 17: ‘Know The Enemy,’” — UHF Office of Public Understanding, PFC 910]
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